Position Marketing Operations as a Strategic Partner: A New Year’s Resolution

2023 is upon us, and with the new year comes the opportunity for a new beginning.

For many of us, this may mean setting a personal goal to stick to a new exercise routine to get in better physical shape. But what are your New Year’s resolutions for your career? For 2023, my New Year’s resolution is to get my marketing operations team in better shape by changing the team’s internal perception.

Too often the MOps function is thought of as a group of tacticians who simply send emails at the request of marketers. What often goes unnoticed is that Marketing Ops professionals have much more to offer than their technical skills. The team truly adds value when they can understand the business goals and identify new areas of opportunity to achieve those goals.

My determination is to change the perception of Marketing Ops to be seen as a strategic partner that marketing leadership relies on to achieve their goals. To do this, I need to market the value of my team internally. Inspired by posts by Darrell Alfonso and Ryan Dunn, here’s a five-step inbound marketing plan on how to do just that.

Dig deeper: what it is marketing operations and who are the MOps pros?

1. Define a marketing objective and key results for how to measure progress

• Goal: Marketing leadership views the Marketing Ops team as a strategic partner.
  • Key Result #1: Increase the percentage of campaigns for which Marketing Ops is invited to be part of initial strategy planning meetings
    • Too often, the marketing operations team is left out of these initial planning meetings and only comes in to execute the campaign after all the key decisions have been made. Our increased involvement in advance planning will show that we are making tangible progress towards being seen as strategic partners.
  • Key Result #2: Track the ROI of campaigns where Marketing Ops was included up front versus campaigns where they weren’t
    • When Marketing Ops is included in strategic planning early on, the team can offer suggestions on ways to use data to improve targeting criteria or optimize the handoff between marketing and sales, etc. These campaigns will be more efficient and effective than campaigns where marketing operations are scrambling just to get something out after all the decisions have been made. Accounting for the difference in ROI between these two situations will demonstrate the tangible value that Marketing Ops brings as a strategic partner.
  • Key Result #3: Reduce the number of “back channel” requests for campaigns or technologies that do not follow the correct adoption and evaluation process
    • When our colleagues don’t follow our onboarding processes and run around them to get things done “quickly,” it shows that they don’t understand the level of effort Marketing Ops needs to do their job well. This key result will show that we are succeeding in educating the rest of the department about the value we bring and the resources we need to do our jobs to the best of our ability.

2. Define the target audience

• CMO
  • Determine what the CMO focuses on the most. Is this new customer growth? Current customer retention? Increase brand awareness? Cut costs and become more efficient? Determining her main goals and finding ways to help her achieve those goals will be critical.
• Marketing Channel Leaders
  • A good tactic to take with channel marketing leaders is to find an area of ​​opportunity that Marketing Ops can help them with, but they haven’t had time to pursue yet. Is there an audience they haven’t had a chance to target yet? Or a specific product they wanted to try and promote? If your marketing operations team can help test some of these ideas that have been in their minds, channel marketers will understand the value that MOps can bring as a strategic partner.
• Sales managers
  • Even though sales managers are outside of the marketing department, getting to know your marketing operations team to the point where they can recognize your team members by name is extremely important. When a sales manager mentions the name of a Marketing Ops team member to the CMO, it will make an impression. Focus on finding a problem that you can help sales solve. What parts of their job are most frustrating? What is the process that is broken and needs to be fixed or can be automated? Find ways to make their lives easier.

3. Interviews with target audience

• Each quarter, identify 1-3 members of your target audience to interview on the following topics:
  1. Technical Stack Audit: What technologies do they use? Are they documented as part of the technical stack? What tools features do they use? What do they like and dislike about their tools?
     • This gives you an opportunity to see if you can empower them by training them on additional features and functionality they can derive from their existing tools, or perhaps find some cost savings by offering to consolidate overlapping or underutilized tools .
  2. Process optimization: Ask them to describe a few processes they use most often. Document these processes and identify areas of opportunity for improvement or automation.
  3. Data and reports: Ask them how they measure their success today and ask them to show you the reports they are currently using. Look for opportunities to either create new reports that would provide value or find ways to enrich existing reports.

4. Prioritize the four-month projects

• Once you’ve identified the projects that could benefit your internal customers based on the interview feedback, it’s time to prioritize those projects based on what you can accomplish this quarter. Create a weighted prioritization matrix to rank the projects to tackle first. Determine the criteria by which you will evaluate your projects (eg: business value, level of effort, customer impact, lead time, etc.) and weight each factor according to its relative importance. Then evaluate your list of potential projects against the criteria and start tackling the highest performing projects first.

• Find ways to communicate your teams’ successes and the impact they’re making to your stakeholders.

• Find ways to communicate your teams’ successes and the impact they’re making to your stakeholders.
  1. Develop a quarterly newsletter that highlights the projects you’ve taken on and the impact you’ve made. Include testimonials or case studies from internal customers who have benefited from your efforts.
  2. Hold quarterly “Lunch and Learn” meetings on a variety of topics to showcase Marketing Ops capabilities. Topics can be training on different tools, or presenting research on industry trends, or a retrospective of a successful project you’ve completed. It’s also a great opportunity to do a Q&A with your stakeholders to find out what they’re most interested in.

Just as developing a workout plan to follow each week will help you reach your personal fitness goals, developing an internal marketing plan can hold you accountable for the work it will take to change the internal perception of your team in marketing operations.

It will take discipline, but by staying focused and continuing to promote your team and educate your internal stakeholders about the value Marketing Operations can offer, your team will earn a seat at the table with other marketing leaders. Once your team is embraced as the strategic partner they should be, the sky’s the limit for what your organization will be able to achieve.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily those of MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About the author

Megan Michuda is currently Senior Vice President, Director of Marketing Operations and Innovation at BOK Financial. Prior to joining BOK Financial, she served as Global Head of Marketing Technology at Janus Henderson Investors. Janus Henderson was the recipient of the Stackie Award in 2018. Megan is currently responsible for BOK Financial’s marketing technology suite, marketing automation, digital analytics and marketing operations. In 2020, Megan’s startup Stacktus was acquired by CabinetM, a leader in marketing technology management. Megan is now both a CabinetM user and advisor. Megan received her BA from Brown University and her MA in Technology Management from the University of Denver.